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ambush

The weasely young guy whose fake ‘pimp’ video gave ACORN’s political enemies enough political cover to shut it down had a great new idea. He was going to lure a CNN reporter into an embarrassing situation– and then broadcast it. A kind of Republican ‘Candid Camera’.

Salon has coverage of James O’Keefe’s plan to use his masculine charm to seduce the reporter– and get even with her for using her ‘bleach blonde’ attributes to get the credibility that rightly belongs to him– at least that’s how he sees it. His plan, interestingly, was foiled by a woman who was supposed to be his assistant. She recognized crazy when she saw it.

The hate behind this plan to sexually humiliate a female journalist, and O’Keefe’s sense of grievance and right to get even is truly creepy. Kind of like a flasher who gets off on scaring and shocking women.

Maybe he wanted to trick [reporter, Abbie] Boudreau into believing she had happened upon a salacious story about another conservative with a sordid secret life just begging to be exposed. Given that O’Keefe sees CNN as wildly biased — which is funny, given that the network is “allergic to opinion to the point of occasional incoherence,” as Alex Pareene put it — it could be that he assumed Boudreau would run wild with the story and then O’Keefe would humiliate her by revealing it as a hoax.
The props seem too slapstick for that, though. I mean, fuzzy handcuffs and Alicia Keys? Is this a sex den or a 20-year-old’s bachelorette party? Also, please note that the list of props includes “an obvious sex tape machine” — you know, one of those crazy sex tape machines the perverts are always using. Maybe O’Keefe’s plan was simply to create an atmosphere of sexual humiliation — to coax Boudreau into an environment filled with sex toys and images of naked ladies — and then document her inevitable discomfort and embarrassment. All the while, O’Keefe makes over-the-top passes at her while she struggles to function in a professional capacity. (Boudreau reports there is also a lot of sexually explicit language in the planning memo that CNN has not yet released.)